We Are Not Machines by Sarah O’Connor review – can dignity at work survive the tech revolution?
It’s never been easy to land and keep a decent job. But it feels like it’s getting harder. In June, the number of job vacancies in the UK fell to a five-year low; headlines warn of a looming AI-employment shock. What might the future of work look like – and who or what will shape its terms? In her new book, Sarah O’Connor goes looking for answers in the modern collision of artificial intelligence, automation, and human labour. This clash between human and machine – and the fight to secure decent working conditions
Warehouses like EMA4 are supported by remote workers in Costa Rica and India, whose jobs are to monitor video feeds of Amazon shelves, auditing the accuracy of the AI camera systems that track where items are placed.
O’Connor has been a reporter at the Financial Times for nearly two decades, and although We Are Not Machines looks to the future, many of the threats AI poses to workers’ dignity and safety look a lot like reconfigurations of old battles.
Machine-ingested summary: the claims above reflect a single primary source and have not been weighed against contradicting evidence by a Truvace editor yet.
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- JournalismThe Guardian2026-07-07
Truvace Impact Record TRV-2026-0092, v1: “We Are Not Machines by Sarah O’Connor review – can dignity at work survive the tech revolution?.” Truvace, 2026-07-12. /record/TRV-2026-0092 (accessed at citation time). sha256 3337a6eb4ad216e5…
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